Understanding Social Media Analytics: Optimizing ROI
Social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing?
Understanding how to link social efforts and social media ROI metrics can help financial institution marketers leverage the sway these channels have over increasingly important demographics while continuing to reach those already undertaking the digital customer journey with your institution.
With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool and can also provide valuable data on customers’ needs and interests.
But all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.
A good starting point is defining those objectives and collecting data with the right social media management tool — one that can make sense of a vast amount of information. The right tools and platforms will boil down the data digital marketers need and give them the confidence to identify ROI metric success and share those insights with their company.
How Can Your Company Properly Utilize Social Media ROI Metrics?
Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific measurable goals that connect to your next social media marketing campaign and benchmark your brand’s social performance. It also requires using the social media analytics and insights available to optimize your social media marketing strategy, increase ROI, and reach business goals. If you’re looking to hone your use of social media ROI metrics to optimize your social media marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Refine your messaging.
Results from every post, whether paid or organic, present opportunities to learn more about what messaging connects with audiences. Upon review, you come to a better understanding of what topics drive greater engagement, which calls to action deliver clicks, and so on, especially with Denim Social’s ability to track individual posts’ performance across channels. This is an iterative process, but paying closer attention to social media ROI metrics can help shape future strategies to resonate with distinct audiences.
2. Home in on your audience.
The beauty of social media marketing is its ability to eliminate wasting time, money, and effort on the wrong audiences. Let’s say you ran a paid social ad. Pull together the social media analytics by target audience, and you will gain insights about who connects with what content. Then, devote some dollars to ad experimentation, coupled with your social media data, and you can start to maximize future ad spend and stop wasting money on irrelevant or disengaged audiences.
3. Capture competitive intelligence.
Research can tell you a lot about consumer sentiments as they relate to not just your institution but the competition as well. Be sure to keep an eye on your top competitors, so that you understand where you're at. Competitive intelligence can provide immeasurable value for finding new marketing opportunities.
4. Connect social clicks to the digital customer journey.
Social media should never mark the end of the digital customer journey. Connect social media to broader customer acquisition tools, like landing pages, contact forms, and more, to free the path of obstacles. With trackable links and social media analytics, you can then connect the digital dots from social media posts to lead generation to the intended sale.
5. Give it time.
Don’t make the mistake of measuring ROI in social media marketing too soon. When connecting the value of social media to broader business objectives, allow enough room to sync your measurement time with the sales cycle. Otherwise, you risk underestimating the impact of such an initiative. In fact, 77% of digital marketers measure ROI within the first month of a campaign, yet 52% have sales cycles of three months or more.
Social media channels are a treasure trove of data often overlooked by financial institution marketers. Denim Social’s platform can help you gather this information with ease and turn it into valuable insights. What’s more, the platform now generates easily sharable analytics reports, so you can show your organization’s leaders exactly how social media marketing efforts tie into the business’s bottom line.
Understanding Social Media Analytics: Optimizing ROI
Social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing?
Understanding how to link social efforts and social media ROI metrics can help financial institution marketers leverage the sway these channels have over increasingly important demographics while continuing to reach those already undertaking the digital customer journey with your institution.
With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool and can also provide valuable data on customers’ needs and interests.
But all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.
A good starting point is defining those objectives and collecting data with the right social media management tool — one that can make sense of a vast amount of information. The right tools and platforms will boil down the data digital marketers need and give them the confidence to identify ROI metric success and share those insights with their company.
How Can Your Company Properly Utilize Social Media ROI Metrics?
Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific measurable goals that connect to your next social media marketing campaign and benchmark your brand’s social performance. It also requires using the social media analytics and insights available to optimize your social media marketing strategy, increase ROI, and reach business goals. If you’re looking to hone your use of social media ROI metrics to optimize your social media marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Refine your messaging.
Results from every post, whether paid or organic, present opportunities to learn more about what messaging connects with audiences. Upon review, you come to a better understanding of what topics drive greater engagement, which calls to action deliver clicks, and so on, especially with Denim Social’s ability to track individual posts’ performance across channels. This is an iterative process, but paying closer attention to social media ROI metrics can help shape future strategies to resonate with distinct audiences.
2. Home in on your audience.
The beauty of social media marketing is its ability to eliminate wasting time, money, and effort on the wrong audiences. Let’s say you ran a paid social ad. Pull together the social media analytics by target audience, and you will gain insights about who connects with what content. Then, devote some dollars to ad experimentation, coupled with your social media data, and you can start to maximize future ad spend and stop wasting money on irrelevant or disengaged audiences.
3. Capture competitive intelligence.
Research can tell you a lot about consumer sentiments as they relate to not just your institution but the competition as well. Be sure to keep an eye on your top competitors, so that you understand where you're at. Competitive intelligence can provide immeasurable value for finding new marketing opportunities.
4. Connect social clicks to the digital customer journey.
Social media should never mark the end of the digital customer journey. Connect social media to broader customer acquisition tools, like landing pages, contact forms, and more, to free the path of obstacles. With trackable links and social media analytics, you can then connect the digital dots from social media posts to lead generation to the intended sale.
5. Give it time.
Don’t make the mistake of measuring ROI in social media marketing too soon. When connecting the value of social media to broader business objectives, allow enough room to sync your measurement time with the sales cycle. Otherwise, you risk underestimating the impact of such an initiative. In fact, 77% of digital marketers measure ROI within the first month of a campaign, yet 52% have sales cycles of three months or more.
Social media channels are a treasure trove of data often overlooked by financial institution marketers. Denim Social’s platform can help you gather this information with ease and turn it into valuable insights. What’s more, the platform now generates easily sharable analytics reports, so you can show your organization’s leaders exactly how social media marketing efforts tie into the business’s bottom line.
Personal relationships are the bedrock of the financial advice industry. Nearly 75 percent of investors prioritize personal relationships when evaluating investment providers, Deloitte found. That’s why providers—even online brokers and robo-advisory firms—are taking care to preserve the human touch. Even with a growing trend toward digital automation to streamline trades and more, human connection is still paramount.
Bank marketers should reflect that by personalizing the digital experiences that they create for wealth management clients and prospects. Investors are accustomed to receiving personalized content online, including from their favorite retailers. They expect the same levels of customization from their service providers.
The benefits of customer personalization are mutual for investors and banks. When customers receive content tailored to their needs and financial situations, they understand their investment opportunities better and feel empowered to make the right financial decisions. And when they see wealth advisors addressing their specific needs—such as estate, retirement or education planning—they will naturally feel like those advisors understand their needs and can help them.
By contrast, when banks and advisors neglect personalization, they risk what Bain and Company calls “hidden defection,” or customers buying high-margin products such as loans, investments, and credit cards from competitors. Even if investors do not leave, they will go elsewhere to place their investments and purchase new financial products. Many customers who defect are attracted by personalized direct offers. That said, almost 80 percent of customers surveyed by Bain said they would have bought from their primary financial institutions if the banks had made equivalent offers.
It is clear that by creating improved digital experiences, banks can retain their clients’ business and even gain wallet share. So, how can they adjust their bank marketing strategies to prioritize customer personalization and build relationships?
1. Embrace a social selling strategy.
Whether financial advisors like it or not, their digital profiles affect how prospects view them. Almost 50 percent of investors say social media impacts whom they hire as a financial professional. And 33 percent report they seek financial advice online, according to Financial Advisor reporting on a Hartford Funds survey. Wealth advisors need to use social media to build rapport (and trust) with clients and prospects. When they demonstrate their value routinely, they’re more likely to be top of mind when customers are ready to purchase. That’s how strong digital profiles lay the foundation for social selling.
Social selling adheres to the same core principles as in-person selling: building relationships with customers, demonstrating knowledge, educating them and helping solve their problems. It all just happens online. Social selling empowers financial advisors to add value for customers through digital means when they wouldn’t have had the opportunity otherwise. Ultimately, sales reps who regularly share content are 45% more likely to exceed their quotas. So it is worth wealth advisors’ time to beef up their social profiles and engage with contacts.
2. Join customers on their preferred channels.
Investors are getting their information somewhere. it is essential to find out where that information comes from and to meet investors where they are.
Then, financial advisors should create profiles on those channels and organically engage with prospective clients. Why? Twenty percent of investors told Hartford Funds that a wealth advisor’s social media was their sole deciding factor when evaluating a financial professional.
For older investors, this might be traditional news channels’ Twitter or Facebook feeds. For younger investors, this could be newer channels such as TikTok. More than one-third of Gen Z Americans say they get financial advice from TikTok, and only 24 percent of investors in this age group get advice from financial advisors, according to a recent Vericast survey. That represents a big opportunity for financial advisors to win young investors’ business by meeting them through these channels. The key is to make any engagement enjoyable and authentic so that clients don’t feel like financial advisors are just trying to sell to them.
3. Create connected customer journeys.
Posting on social media is a great start, but if bank marketers want to drive ROI, they must create more robust digital journeys. The key to connected investor journeys is to avoid digital dead ends and always offer clear next steps.
At the start of the journey, wealth advisors must interact and create two-way dialogue online with existing audiences. They should then expand their audiences through tactics such as paid social media advertising, which can help them reach investors similar to their current customers or new target audiences.
In their social posts, financial advisors can drive audiences to content-driven landing pages that contain resources to download in exchange for contact information, which can help capture leads. Every step of the way, investors need to see the value, whether through educational content that wealth advisors share, access to more in-depth resources or complimentary consultations.
Banks benefit when they embrace customer personalization in their marketing strategies to keep customers engaged, build rapport and ultimately close more sales. That starts with giving wealth advisors access to the right processes and technology to deliver personalized education and offers. Once properly empowered, advisors can meet clients where they are, establish themselves as trustworthy, generate more leads and reduce the risk of “hidden defection” over time.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
Analytics should drive every financial institution’s social strategy. From rising consumer expectations to increased c-suite demands, measurable results are a requirement for a successful social media strategy. That means today’s financial marketers must be able to link social media efforts to ROI metrics.
In the latest Denim Social guide, we’ll help you understand how to use social media analytics to:
- Gain valuable insights on what your customers want
- Optimize social media efforts to drive results
- Demonstrate results to leadership, securing support and budget
Click below to get started on your analytics journey:
A Guide to Using Social Media Analytics to Enhance Your Financial Institution's Marketing Strategy
Social media for banks is a necessity. That’s a given. You meet customers where they are, and today, that’s online. But customers (and potential customers) are not just engaging and interacting with one bank’s website, apps and social accounts. They are seeing competitors’ accounts, too. Bank marketers must leverage social media analytics to understand what works for their competitors—and figure out how to do it better.
A competitive analysis of social media data in the banking industry can help guide your strategy by quantifying the successes and failures of your rivals. This is especially true of community banks, which may feel they are fighting an uphill digital battle against the resources of fintech companies and enterprise financial institutions. Thankfully, lots of competitor data is publicly available. Plenty of successes and blunders are out there for any savvy bank marketer to learn from. With the right social media analytics tool, this data could be the key to keeping up in today’s fast-paced environment.
There’s a lot of powerful data on social media, and banks can leverage this to their advantage. Analytics and competitive insights empower bank marketers—even at smaller institutions—to be smart and efficient with both their time and dollars. You cannot differentiate your institution unless you know and understand the stories your competitors are telling.
You also need to be aware of the quality of your competitors’ ads, calls to action and websites. If your marketing materials are not comparable you could lose customers. It is more than just optimizing a landing page—there needs to be a quality experience at every possible touchpoint. To start understanding competitors, consider these three tips when analyzing social media for banks:
1. Benchmark your strategy. Benchmarking is the foundation of any competitive marketing strategy because it shows how measuring your competitors’ performance can help you step up your bank’s marketing game.
With social listening tools that enable tracking competitors’ social media activity, leaders can see the organization’s performance benchmarked against competitors and get a clear picture of where social needs more investment to stay competitive.
For instance, if you’re working to understand how often your team should be posting to social media channels, look at how often a competitor is posting. Or if you’re aiming for 50 percent audience growth and see everyone else has 5 percent month-over-month, you know to adjust expectations to be more achievable.
2. Understand what is resonating. When financial institutions embrace social listening, they gain clear insight into how other brands are producing engagement on social channels and resonating with customers. One bank finding resonance could be an outlier, but if multiple competitors are using the same technique, your brand can use those trend insights to craft even more relevant messaging and maintain an advantage against the competition.
Track which trends and are getting high engagement for your competitors. Which topics that drive the most engagement? Certain aspects of storytelling? Or maybe specific kinds of posts, such as short-form videos, resonate best. Understanding what works for your competitors will teach you what works for you. Conversely, if they have posts that are driving little to no engagement, learn from their mistakes and avoid spending your time and dollars doing the same thing.
3. Identify proactive opportunities. Monitoring competitors on social media can provide unique insights and offer proactive opportunities for your institution to pick up a customer. For better or worse, social media gives us all a view into a brand’s dirty laundry. If you notice a competitor getting social media complaints on a particular service or product, this could be an opportunity for you to target that audience and tell them how you do it better.
Are people posting messages on your competitors’ pages about how hard it is to reach a customer service representative with them? Grab the opportunity and design a targeted paid campaign that emphasizes your institution’s excellent customer service.
These moments may not come often or easily, so stay vigilant to make the most of them.
Competitor social media analysis is a vital tool to help smaller financial institutions remain competitive. It keeps your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the industry while identifying what’s working—and what’s not—for the bigger players.
This article was originally published on ABA Bank Marketing.
Before a customer makes a purchase, they go through a decision process called the buying journey. They initially become aware of a brand, learn more about it, evaluate whether it’s an appropriate option for their needs, and finally, make the choice to buy in or not. For marketers in the financial industry, this customer buying journey presents an opportunity to utilize a full-funnel marketing strategy. This approach involves getting the right content and messaging in front of the right customer at the right time, strategically engaging them at each stage of the funnel in the lead up to purchase.
This full-funnel marketing approach is important to the customer buying journey; at each stage, it allows marketers to pique interest, build trust, and encourage action. With customers expecting brands to meet their needs online, this gives financial marketers a unique opportunity to connect with audiences by creating touchpoints along the way. Ultimately, a full-funnel strategy helps financial institutions align marketing efforts with business ROI. Let’s take a look at each stage of the buying process using a full-funnel approach and how social media can help move customers down the funnel.
Create Brand Awareness With Organic Social
The first step of the full-funnel marketing approach is awareness – a customer needs to know a business exists before they can do anything else. Here, customers learn about the brand and what value it provides. Through organic publishing with curated social media content, brands can share targeted messages with wide-reaching audiences. Creating a robust and interesting content mix that informs, educates, and entertains is the first step in giving a brand a place in a customer’s mind.
Engage Audiences With Paid Advertising
While establishing a consistent organic content routine is the foundation of the full-funnel process, moving customers along the buying journey requires engagement. The best way to make sure that the right customers are viewing content is to target them through paid advertising. Social advertising campaigns allow marketers to multiply their efforts through the power of intelligent targeting and better manage audience behavior. This way, the people that see a paid ad will be the most likely to be interested in it and engage.
Encourage Consideration With Relevant Landing Pages
Any social media post, organic or paid, should lead a customer to a landing page, where they will visit a brand’s website to learn more. For example, a brand can link to a personalized landing page that includes a form to collect customer information in exchange for access to content. It’s mutually beneficial – a customer receives content and a business now has a lead to continue nurturing.
Convert and Retain Customers With Retargeting
Finally, conversion is where the magic happens. At this stage, a customer has the information they need to make a purchase decision. With retargeting, marketers can continue to lead the customer along the buying journey by connecting based on previous engagement. While converting a lead to a customer is an excellent way to track success, the journey doesn’t end there. Conversion is simply another step in the circular journey, as the next step is to grow them into a loyal customer that can then become a valuable resource and reference for the brand.
The overall key to successfully adopting a full-funnel marketing approach is to meet customers where they are, and encourage them to move along the buying process. And that involves addressing them at every stage of the funnel to raise brand awareness, answer questions about the brand, and nurture people through final decision-making. The customer journey and full-funnel approach is ongoing, and can be a great way to better understand how you are meeting business goals and expectations through social media efforts.
Want to be empowered to embrace marketing opportunities at each stage of the customer buying journey? Having the right social media management tools for financial services at your disposal is the first step. Get started with a demo today.
Spring has long been a competitive season for both homebuyers and lenders, but this spring is different for mortgage loan officers. Rates are up, applications are down. Mortgage loan officers can no longer rely on bargain rates and that means they need to work harder than ever to best the competition. So how does a loan officer stand out? It’s all about social media.
It should be obvious at this point that social media can support your lending business, but it’s no longer enough to simply post to a brand page and hope for the best. In today’s social environment, lenders and loan officers must humanize their brand, amplify their reach and work to initiate robust digital experiences.
As you plan your social media program this spring, consider these three strategies:
- Humanize Your Brand with Social Selling: Put simply, people buy from people. That means you need to put loan officers front and center on social media. It’s called social selling and it works. Activating mortgage loan officers in a social selling strategy is a key way to expand reach and drive engagement. LinkedIn reports sales reps who engage in social selling achieve 45% more sales opportunities and are 51% more likely to hit their sales quotas.
- Amplify Reach with Paid Social Media Advertising: Organically posting on mortgage loan officers’ profiles is a necessary first step in social selling, but it’s just the start. Organic posts – some may say ‘viral’ posts – may have received a lot of attention years ago, but social media platforms change their algorithms frequently, making branded content less visible. Organic content can’t stand on its own, but when paired with paid social media advertising, however, you can drive show huge returns. Paid advertising allows marketers to land loan officers’ posts in front of the right audiences at the right times.
- Start Digital Journeys: Think of your social selling strategies as customer experience builders, not just collections of standalone posts. Research shows that the vast majority of financial institutions are missing out on this opportunity to create experiences by failing to include links in posts. Sounds like no big deal, right? Think again. Links are important because they give followers a next step in their journey with your brand. A link to a landing page, for instance, could capture valuable lead information to drive deals.
In a season where every deal matters, a smart social media strategy could give your mortgage loan officers considerable edge. And with the right tools, both marketing teams and mortgage loan officers can efficiently execute and scale to drive big results. It’s tough out there, but building your social media strategy today means you have the opportunity to leave another lender in your social media dust.
This article was originally published in MBA Newslink.
Digital-direct lenders have been staking out a larger and larger claim to the mortgage space. In 2019 alone, 58.9% of all U.S. mortgages originated from nonbank mortgage lenders. In 2020, that number jumped to 68.1%. People are increasingly adopting digital solutions, which is precisely what these lenders offer. They provide a fast and efficient means of securing a mortgage.
But speed and convenience aren’t everything, and traditional lenders still have at least one ace in their back pockets. Digital-direct lenders can’t establish human relationships like traditional mortgage loan officers can. Lenders will find their competitive advantage by building genuine connections and nurturing relationships over time.
With more than three-fourths of borrowers moving forward with the first lender they speak to, being the first in front of them to make an initial connection is the key to securing more mortgage business over time. In today’s increasingly digital world, social media is where loan officers can meet customers where they are and continue maintaining those relationships.
Mortgage marketers looking to make the most of their human resources and move the needle on deals closed will need a solid social media mortgage marketing strategy — one built on a path to scalability. The first step is creating a social media content plan.
Developing a Social Media Content Plan
Mortgage marketers need to activate loan officers on social media. Employee personal accounts have greater reach than brand pages alone, and consumers see posts from individuals as more authentic and trustworthy than those from companies.
Loan officers, however, aren’t marketers, and they’re busier than ever, as interest rates have been at historic lows. In other words, loan officers need support with their mortgage marketing efforts to execute social selling programs strategically.
Enter the social media content plan to detail when and what mortgage loan officers will post.
Consistency is critical with social media for mortgage loan officers. The post frequency you outline in your social media content plan will vary based on your resources and team, but Denim Social’s recent benchmark report can give you a good idea of how often your competitors are posting to get you started.
When it comes to the right content to include in your plan, social media marketing for mortgage loan officers should include the right mix of educational information, personalized posts, and promotional content. Denim Social’s platform can create curated content libraries from trusted third-party news sources, taking the time and effort of sourcing educational material out of loan officers’ and marketers’ hands.
Keep promotional content to a minimum, and when loan officers do share these types of posts, make them helpful and meaningful. Linking to personalized landing pages from promotional posts to guide prospects to the information they want and need is a great way to drive more value from social media.
Of course, educational and promotional content developed and scheduled by marketers and posted by loan officers only has so much power. Remember, the point of social media marketing for loan officers is to get the human element front and center. People prefer doing business with people, so loan officers should also be developing their own posts to showcase their distinct personalities, make connections, and build and strengthen customer relationships. For example, loan officers could share photos of closings or videos from community events.
While the right social media content plan and management tools will make social selling quick and easy for loan officers and marketers alike, marketers will still need to provide loan officers with some guidance. Social media training for loan officers will ensure every post is effective and compliant.
Social Media Training Tips
The average age of mortgage loan officers is 47, so chances are most members of your team aren’t digital natives. This doesn’t mean they’ll be opposed to learning or using social media, but social media training can help them get comfortable with platforms and use social strategies to their fullest potential.
While social media training programs won’t look the same for every organization, they should all explain the opportunity behind social selling and highlight the importance of consistent posting to build genuine connections. Share information about what social media marketing for mortgage loan officers can do to build brand awareness and generate leads. According to LinkedIn data, salespeople who maintain an active social media presence are 57% more like to generate leads and 45% more likely to reach quota than those who post less frequently. Considering that the average borrower purchases 11 mortgages in their lifetime, a strong social media presence can do wonders for securing business.
From there, explain why it’s essential to keep a consistent social media presence — but be sure to highlight how doing so won’t be a burden for loan officers. If loan officers don’t post regularly, social media platform algorithms may bury posts in users’ feeds and cause loan officers to drop off borrowers’ radars. But marketers can develop thoughtful social media content plans and schedule posts in advance to alleviate the pressure on loan officers to post frequently.
Marketers can handle educational and promotional posts, but loan officers do still need to add their own touch with personal content. Of course, electronic communication, including social media, is heavily regulated in financial services. Loan officers might be hesitant to create posts on their own due to social media compliance concerns. Marketers can ease their worries by assuring them that no post will go live without proper approval. Denim Social’s automatic approval workflow will get every post in front of the right people for appropriate review and sign-off.
Scaling Your Social Selling Tactics
For marketers overseeing hundreds or thousands of loan officers on social media, the idea of scaling effective and compliant social selling strategies can seem daunting or even impossible, especially if you’re still juggling different spreadsheets for login and posting information. If that sounds like you, you’re in luck: Denim Social enables you to post on various platforms from hundreds of loan officers’ profiles in just a few clicks — all from one easily-accessible dashboard.
Denim Social can also help marketers scale compliance oversight. Whereas many social media management tools are aimed at consumer brands and small businesses that don’t have to worry about regulatory concerns, Denim Social’s platform has been designed specifically with financial institutions’ needs in mind — including compliance. Along with preapproved content libraries and automated approval workflows, the platform also enables marketers to filter for keywords that could raise compliance concerns to flag potentially problematic content before it makes it to the approval step, eliminating approval process bottlenecks. These elements allow mortgage marketers to scale compliance across every loan officers’ social media strategy with ease.
Scaling compliant educational, personal, and limited promotional posts for loan officers is crucial for social media mortgage marketing, but it’s not the only important component to consider. Changing social media algorithms have made organic posts less visible over time. While these posts can still gain some traction, strategies that include paid social media advertising will deliver the most impact.
Paid Social Media Advertising
While organic content might be less impactful on its own than it once was, pairing it with paid social media advertising can bring in significant returns. Marketers can target paid posts to show up in front of the right people at the right times. For example, a loan officer looking to secure more first-time mortgage business could target recent college graduates in the local community with educational, informative posts about buying their first home.
And just like with organic posts, marketers can pull off compliant and effective paid social media advertising at scale with Denim Social. Our social media management tool combines both organic and paid into one platform to streamline your planning and oversight efforts.
Today, an effective mortgage marketing strategy for traditional lenders looks like using social media to create and maintain relationships between loan officers and customers. Thoughtful social media content plans, social media training for loan officers, and the tools to scale efforts across as many loan officers as possible will bring impressive returns. It might seem like a massive effort at first, but the right technology partners can get your social media mortgage marketing strategy up and running quickly to drive results in no time. Schedule a demo with Denim Social to see how we can work for you.
Connect & Convert on Social
Understanding Social Media Analytics: Optimizing ROI
Social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing?
Understanding how to link social efforts and social media ROI metrics can help financial institution marketers leverage the sway these channels have over increasingly important demographics while continuing to reach those already undertaking the digital customer journey with your institution.
With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool and can also provide valuable data on customers’ needs and interests.
But all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.
A good starting point is defining those objectives and collecting data with the right social media management tool — one that can make sense of a vast amount of information. The right tools and platforms will boil down the data digital marketers need and give them the confidence to identify ROI metric success and share those insights with their company.
How Can Your Company Properly Utilize Social Media ROI Metrics?
Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific measurable goals that connect to your next social media marketing campaign and benchmark your brand’s social performance. It also requires using the social media analytics and insights available to optimize your social media marketing strategy, increase ROI, and reach business goals. If you’re looking to hone your use of social media ROI metrics to optimize your social media marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Refine your messaging.
Results from every post, whether paid or organic, present opportunities to learn more about what messaging connects with audiences. Upon review, you come to a better understanding of what topics drive greater engagement, which calls to action deliver clicks, and so on, especially with Denim Social’s ability to track individual posts’ performance across channels. This is an iterative process, but paying closer attention to social media ROI metrics can help shape future strategies to resonate with distinct audiences.
2. Home in on your audience.
The beauty of social media marketing is its ability to eliminate wasting time, money, and effort on the wrong audiences. Let’s say you ran a paid social ad. Pull together the social media analytics by target audience, and you will gain insights about who connects with what content. Then, devote some dollars to ad experimentation, coupled with your social media data, and you can start to maximize future ad spend and stop wasting money on irrelevant or disengaged audiences.
3. Capture competitive intelligence.
Research can tell you a lot about consumer sentiments as they relate to not just your institution but the competition as well. Be sure to keep an eye on your top competitors, so that you understand where you're at. Competitive intelligence can provide immeasurable value for finding new marketing opportunities.
4. Connect social clicks to the digital customer journey.
Social media should never mark the end of the digital customer journey. Connect social media to broader customer acquisition tools, like landing pages, contact forms, and more, to free the path of obstacles. With trackable links and social media analytics, you can then connect the digital dots from social media posts to lead generation to the intended sale.
5. Give it time.
Don’t make the mistake of measuring ROI in social media marketing too soon. When connecting the value of social media to broader business objectives, allow enough room to sync your measurement time with the sales cycle. Otherwise, you risk underestimating the impact of such an initiative. In fact, 77% of digital marketers measure ROI within the first month of a campaign, yet 52% have sales cycles of three months or more.
Social media channels are a treasure trove of data often overlooked by financial institution marketers. Denim Social’s platform can help you gather this information with ease and turn it into valuable insights. What’s more, the platform now generates easily sharable analytics reports, so you can show your organization’s leaders exactly how social media marketing efforts tie into the business’s bottom line.
Understanding Social Media Analytics: Optimizing ROI
Social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing?
Understanding how to link social efforts and social media ROI metrics can help financial institution marketers leverage the sway these channels have over increasingly important demographics while continuing to reach those already undertaking the digital customer journey with your institution.
With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool and can also provide valuable data on customers’ needs and interests.
But all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.
A good starting point is defining those objectives and collecting data with the right social media management tool — one that can make sense of a vast amount of information. The right tools and platforms will boil down the data digital marketers need and give them the confidence to identify ROI metric success and share those insights with their company.
How Can Your Company Properly Utilize Social Media ROI Metrics?
Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific measurable goals that connect to your next social media marketing campaign and benchmark your brand’s social performance. It also requires using the social media analytics and insights available to optimize your social media marketing strategy, increase ROI, and reach business goals. If you’re looking to hone your use of social media ROI metrics to optimize your social media marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Refine your messaging.
Results from every post, whether paid or organic, present opportunities to learn more about what messaging connects with audiences. Upon review, you come to a better understanding of what topics drive greater engagement, which calls to action deliver clicks, and so on, especially with Denim Social’s ability to track individual posts’ performance across channels. This is an iterative process, but paying closer attention to social media ROI metrics can help shape future strategies to resonate with distinct audiences.
2. Home in on your audience.
The beauty of social media marketing is its ability to eliminate wasting time, money, and effort on the wrong audiences. Let’s say you ran a paid social ad. Pull together the social media analytics by target audience, and you will gain insights about who connects with what content. Then, devote some dollars to ad experimentation, coupled with your social media data, and you can start to maximize future ad spend and stop wasting money on irrelevant or disengaged audiences.
3. Capture competitive intelligence.
Research can tell you a lot about consumer sentiments as they relate to not just your institution but the competition as well. Be sure to keep an eye on your top competitors, so that you understand where you're at. Competitive intelligence can provide immeasurable value for finding new marketing opportunities.
4. Connect social clicks to the digital customer journey.
Social media should never mark the end of the digital customer journey. Connect social media to broader customer acquisition tools, like landing pages, contact forms, and more, to free the path of obstacles. With trackable links and social media analytics, you can then connect the digital dots from social media posts to lead generation to the intended sale.
5. Give it time.
Don’t make the mistake of measuring ROI in social media marketing too soon. When connecting the value of social media to broader business objectives, allow enough room to sync your measurement time with the sales cycle. Otherwise, you risk underestimating the impact of such an initiative. In fact, 77% of digital marketers measure ROI within the first month of a campaign, yet 52% have sales cycles of three months or more.
Social media channels are a treasure trove of data often overlooked by financial institution marketers. Denim Social’s platform can help you gather this information with ease and turn it into valuable insights. What’s more, the platform now generates easily sharable analytics reports, so you can show your organization’s leaders exactly how social media marketing efforts tie into the business’s bottom line.
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
Understanding Social Media Analytics: Optimizing ROI
Social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing?
Understanding how to link social efforts and social media ROI metrics can help financial institution marketers leverage the sway these channels have over increasingly important demographics while continuing to reach those already undertaking the digital customer journey with your institution.
With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool and can also provide valuable data on customers’ needs and interests.
But all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.
A good starting point is defining those objectives and collecting data with the right social media management tool — one that can make sense of a vast amount of information. The right tools and platforms will boil down the data digital marketers need and give them the confidence to identify ROI metric success and share those insights with their company.
How Can Your Company Properly Utilize Social Media ROI Metrics?
Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific measurable goals that connect to your next social media marketing campaign and benchmark your brand’s social performance. It also requires using the social media analytics and insights available to optimize your social media marketing strategy, increase ROI, and reach business goals. If you’re looking to hone your use of social media ROI metrics to optimize your social media marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Refine your messaging.
Results from every post, whether paid or organic, present opportunities to learn more about what messaging connects with audiences. Upon review, you come to a better understanding of what topics drive greater engagement, which calls to action deliver clicks, and so on, especially with Denim Social’s ability to track individual posts’ performance across channels. This is an iterative process, but paying closer attention to social media ROI metrics can help shape future strategies to resonate with distinct audiences.
2. Home in on your audience.
The beauty of social media marketing is its ability to eliminate wasting time, money, and effort on the wrong audiences. Let’s say you ran a paid social ad. Pull together the social media analytics by target audience, and you will gain insights about who connects with what content. Then, devote some dollars to ad experimentation, coupled with your social media data, and you can start to maximize future ad spend and stop wasting money on irrelevant or disengaged audiences.
3. Capture competitive intelligence.
Research can tell you a lot about consumer sentiments as they relate to not just your institution but the competition as well. Be sure to keep an eye on your top competitors, so that you understand where you're at. Competitive intelligence can provide immeasurable value for finding new marketing opportunities.
4. Connect social clicks to the digital customer journey.
Social media should never mark the end of the digital customer journey. Connect social media to broader customer acquisition tools, like landing pages, contact forms, and more, to free the path of obstacles. With trackable links and social media analytics, you can then connect the digital dots from social media posts to lead generation to the intended sale.
5. Give it time.
Don’t make the mistake of measuring ROI in social media marketing too soon. When connecting the value of social media to broader business objectives, allow enough room to sync your measurement time with the sales cycle. Otherwise, you risk underestimating the impact of such an initiative. In fact, 77% of digital marketers measure ROI within the first month of a campaign, yet 52% have sales cycles of three months or more.
Social media channels are a treasure trove of data often overlooked by financial institution marketers. Denim Social’s platform can help you gather this information with ease and turn it into valuable insights. What’s more, the platform now generates easily sharable analytics reports, so you can show your organization’s leaders exactly how social media marketing efforts tie into the business’s bottom line.
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
Understanding Social Media Analytics: Optimizing ROI
Social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing?
Understanding how to link social efforts and social media ROI metrics can help financial institution marketers leverage the sway these channels have over increasingly important demographics while continuing to reach those already undertaking the digital customer journey with your institution.
With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool and can also provide valuable data on customers’ needs and interests.
But all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.
A good starting point is defining those objectives and collecting data with the right social media management tool — one that can make sense of a vast amount of information. The right tools and platforms will boil down the data digital marketers need and give them the confidence to identify ROI metric success and share those insights with their company.
How Can Your Company Properly Utilize Social Media ROI Metrics?
Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific measurable goals that connect to your next social media marketing campaign and benchmark your brand’s social performance. It also requires using the social media analytics and insights available to optimize your social media marketing strategy, increase ROI, and reach business goals. If you’re looking to hone your use of social media ROI metrics to optimize your social media marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Refine your messaging.
Results from every post, whether paid or organic, present opportunities to learn more about what messaging connects with audiences. Upon review, you come to a better understanding of what topics drive greater engagement, which calls to action deliver clicks, and so on, especially with Denim Social’s ability to track individual posts’ performance across channels. This is an iterative process, but paying closer attention to social media ROI metrics can help shape future strategies to resonate with distinct audiences.
2. Home in on your audience.
The beauty of social media marketing is its ability to eliminate wasting time, money, and effort on the wrong audiences. Let’s say you ran a paid social ad. Pull together the social media analytics by target audience, and you will gain insights about who connects with what content. Then, devote some dollars to ad experimentation, coupled with your social media data, and you can start to maximize future ad spend and stop wasting money on irrelevant or disengaged audiences.
3. Capture competitive intelligence.
Research can tell you a lot about consumer sentiments as they relate to not just your institution but the competition as well. Be sure to keep an eye on your top competitors, so that you understand where you're at. Competitive intelligence can provide immeasurable value for finding new marketing opportunities.
4. Connect social clicks to the digital customer journey.
Social media should never mark the end of the digital customer journey. Connect social media to broader customer acquisition tools, like landing pages, contact forms, and more, to free the path of obstacles. With trackable links and social media analytics, you can then connect the digital dots from social media posts to lead generation to the intended sale.
5. Give it time.
Don’t make the mistake of measuring ROI in social media marketing too soon. When connecting the value of social media to broader business objectives, allow enough room to sync your measurement time with the sales cycle. Otherwise, you risk underestimating the impact of such an initiative. In fact, 77% of digital marketers measure ROI within the first month of a campaign, yet 52% have sales cycles of three months or more.
Social media channels are a treasure trove of data often overlooked by financial institution marketers. Denim Social’s platform can help you gather this information with ease and turn it into valuable insights. What’s more, the platform now generates easily sharable analytics reports, so you can show your organization’s leaders exactly how social media marketing efforts tie into the business’s bottom line.
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
Understanding Social Media Analytics: Optimizing ROI
Social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing?
Understanding how to link social efforts and social media ROI metrics can help financial institution marketers leverage the sway these channels have over increasingly important demographics while continuing to reach those already undertaking the digital customer journey with your institution.
With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool and can also provide valuable data on customers’ needs and interests.
But all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.
A good starting point is defining those objectives and collecting data with the right social media management tool — one that can make sense of a vast amount of information. The right tools and platforms will boil down the data digital marketers need and give them the confidence to identify ROI metric success and share those insights with their company.
How Can Your Company Properly Utilize Social Media ROI Metrics?
Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific measurable goals that connect to your next social media marketing campaign and benchmark your brand’s social performance. It also requires using the social media analytics and insights available to optimize your social media marketing strategy, increase ROI, and reach business goals. If you’re looking to hone your use of social media ROI metrics to optimize your social media marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Refine your messaging.
Results from every post, whether paid or organic, present opportunities to learn more about what messaging connects with audiences. Upon review, you come to a better understanding of what topics drive greater engagement, which calls to action deliver clicks, and so on, especially with Denim Social’s ability to track individual posts’ performance across channels. This is an iterative process, but paying closer attention to social media ROI metrics can help shape future strategies to resonate with distinct audiences.
2. Home in on your audience.
The beauty of social media marketing is its ability to eliminate wasting time, money, and effort on the wrong audiences. Let’s say you ran a paid social ad. Pull together the social media analytics by target audience, and you will gain insights about who connects with what content. Then, devote some dollars to ad experimentation, coupled with your social media data, and you can start to maximize future ad spend and stop wasting money on irrelevant or disengaged audiences.
3. Capture competitive intelligence.
Research can tell you a lot about consumer sentiments as they relate to not just your institution but the competition as well. Be sure to keep an eye on your top competitors, so that you understand where you're at. Competitive intelligence can provide immeasurable value for finding new marketing opportunities.
4. Connect social clicks to the digital customer journey.
Social media should never mark the end of the digital customer journey. Connect social media to broader customer acquisition tools, like landing pages, contact forms, and more, to free the path of obstacles. With trackable links and social media analytics, you can then connect the digital dots from social media posts to lead generation to the intended sale.
5. Give it time.
Don’t make the mistake of measuring ROI in social media marketing too soon. When connecting the value of social media to broader business objectives, allow enough room to sync your measurement time with the sales cycle. Otherwise, you risk underestimating the impact of such an initiative. In fact, 77% of digital marketers measure ROI within the first month of a campaign, yet 52% have sales cycles of three months or more.
Social media channels are a treasure trove of data often overlooked by financial institution marketers. Denim Social’s platform can help you gather this information with ease and turn it into valuable insights. What’s more, the platform now generates easily sharable analytics reports, so you can show your organization’s leaders exactly how social media marketing efforts tie into the business’s bottom line.
In today's digital age, social media platforms have become essential tools for professionals in various industries to connect with clients, share valuable insights, and build their brand. Instagram, with its visual appeal and highly-engaged user base, is no exception. For financial professionals, leveraging Instagram can be a powerful way to showcase expertise, establish credibility, and build stronger relationships. In this blog post, we will discuss the best practices for building your Instagram business profile as a financial professional that will give your social selling a boost.
Choose a Professional Username and Profile Picture
Start by selecting a username that reflects your name or your financial business's name. Keep it simple and easy to remember. Use a high-quality profile picture, such as a professional headshot or your company logo. This picture will be the first impression potential followers have of you.
Optimize Your Bio
Craft a concise and informative bio that clearly defines your role and expertise. Use relevant keywords, such as "Financial Advisor," "Mortgage Loan Officer,” or "Insurance Agent." Include a brief but captivating description of the value you provide to your customers. Highlight any unique selling points or specializations.
Content Strategy
Determine your content niche. Share content that aligns with your expertise, such as investment tips, financial planning advice, or market insights. Develop a content calendar to ensure consistency. Aim for a mix of educational, inspirational, and personal posts. Use high-quality images and graphics to enhance your posts. Visual appeal is essential on Instagram!
Engage Your Audience
Respond promptly to comments and direct messages. Engaging with your followers builds a sense of trust and connection. You want your followers to engage with your posts, so do the same for them! Like, comment, and share to help increase visibility.
Use Hashtags Wisely
Research and use relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your posts. Utilize both industry-specific and popular hashtags. Best practice is to use 5-10 hashtags per post as they relate to the content.
Collaborate and Network
Collaborate with influencers or other professionals in your industry. Guest posts or shoutouts can expand your reach. Attend industry events and share your experiences on Instagram. It’s all about taking those in-person relationships online, too.
Educate and Inform
Share informative and educational content that empowers your audience. Explainer videos, infographics, and step-by-step guides can be especially valuable. Stay up-to-date with the latest financial news and trends, and share your unique insights with your followers. Always provide value!
Analytics and Optimization
Regularly analyze your Instagram Insights to understand which content performs best and when your audience is most active. Use this data to refine your content strategy and posting schedule for optimal engagement.
Promote Your Services
While Instagram is a platform for sharing valuable content, don't forget to promote your services subtly. Share client success stories or case studies to showcase your expertise in action.
Stay Compliant
Ensure that your posts comply with industry regulations and guidelines. Be transparent about any potential conflicts of interest. Luckily, platforms like Denim Social that are built for the financial services industry can help with that!
In conclusion, Instagram can be a valuable tool for financial professionals to connect with clients and prospects. By following these best practices, you can build a strong and trustworthy online presence that sets you apart in the competitive world of finance. Remember that consistency and authenticity are key to establishing a successful Instagram business profile for financial professionals. See our Denim Social guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram here!
Instagram stands out as the shining star of social media platforms. While Facebook still reigns supreme and TikTok grows, Instagram is quickly catching up fast with more than 2 billion users worldwide.
With users under age 34 making up nearly 60 percent of this user population, financial services marketers looking to reach younger generations should take note. And with an estimated sum of $68 trillion in wealth expected to transfer from Baby Boomers to Millennials in the next couple of decades, Millennials are a worthwhile target.
Studies predict that, after inheriting wealth, 80% or more young heirs will seek out a new financial advisor. Considering that 9 in 10 accounts follow at least one business on Instagram and 8 in 10 users find new products and services in the app, it’s a safe bet that Instagram will be a place to influence many Millennials. Wise financial services marketers will meet them where they are with strong Instagram marketing strategies, and the following tips can help:
1. Focus on paid ads
Instagram is a visual platform for sharing photos and videos, so it’s important for brand pages to populate their profiles with organic posts. While this presence is important, organic content isn’t what will move the needle on business goals. Financial services aren’t exactly visually interesting, and organic posts tend to have low reach as they only show up in the feeds of a brand’s current followers. Without the ability to include hyperlinks in captions, they also won’t drive any traffic back to your site. If you want to build the type of following needed to generate new business, including paid advertising in your Instagram marketing strategy is your ticket.
With Instagram advertising, institutions and advisors can target ads to land with exactly the right audience — even outside their follower base — and include links in posts to drive more traffic to the brand. With a specific call to action that directs consumers to learn more about a topic, Instagram ads offer a straight-line path to giving customers the valuable information they desire — in their own time and at their own place. What’s more, Instagram advertising is seamlessly integrated directly into Instagram feeds and stories, creating a smoother user experience all around.
2. Connect with consumers on a local level
Instagram marketing on the corporate brand level is a great starting point, but advertising on behalf of your individual advisors can take your strategy to the next level. Think of it this way: If a consumer sees a well-known brand on social media, they might recognize the name, but they won’t feel an intrinsic connection beyond initial familiarity. In contrast, they’ll feel familiarity and an immediate connection when they see a post from an advisor in their own community. Consumers want to build relationships with brands, and a shared community is a great starting point.
Of course, most advisors and other financial services employees are not experts on how to market the business on Instagram. And marketers know they must keep all social media marketing for their financial institutions compliant to avoid heavy regulatory reprimands. To keep posts compliant, save employees time, and help them build relationships with consumers in their physical communities, financial services marketers can set up and run ads on their behalf.
3. Micro-target content to your audience
As big-name brands like Amazon continue to elevate the digital customer experience with seamless customer service, purchasing, and delivery, customer expectations are higher than ever before. When customers evaluate a financial institution, they compare it not only to other organizations in the industry, but also to tech giants in any industry that give them exactly what they need when they need it.
They expect a high level of personalization and convenience, and Instagram marketing with paid advertising can help you give it to them. Match basic behavioral and geographic data to potential customers on Instagram to target ads, and then track clicks, engagements, and post-click actions. These data points don’t indicate much on their own, but together they offer a rich story about what consumers want. Continually refine your strategy with these data points in mind to deliver the kind of highly personalized experiences your audiences want on Instagram.
With a large Millennial user base that engages actively with brands online and the ability to target highly personalized ads to exactly the right audiences, Instagram is a must-have in any financial services marketing strategy. To learn more about how Instagram marketing can work to drive your business forward, download our guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram for free today.
Make the most of your social media pages and posts by optimizing your images and including essential information about your business on each platform. By giving customers an optimal digital experience, you can broaden reach and provide better customer service through your digital platforms.
IMAGE SIZING:
Profile picture: 176 x 176px (desktop), 196x 196px (smartphones)
Cover photo: 820 x 312px (desktop), 640 x 360px (smartphones)
Keep the main content of your image centered. On a desktop the photo will display as 840x312px, but on mobile will size down to 640x360px.
Facebook post image: 1200 x 630px
The ideal width for a Facebook post image is 1200px, but height can vary based on what type of device the image display is optimized for. We recommend keeping it at the recommended size to keep consistency on all devices.
When creating a Facebook Ad graphic, any text should not take up more than 20% of the photo. You can find a cheat sheet here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay.
Facebook Video: 1280 x 720px
The optimal length for a short-form video on Facebook is 15 seconds to 1 minute; for a long-form video, it is 3 minutes. The maximum file size is 10GB.
Facebook Link Image: 1200 x 630px
Make sure to claim ownership of your links for the ability to change the link preview photo. You can find more info on that here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/528858287471922?id=708699556338610.
Carousel Post: 1080 x 1080px
Carousel posts are a great way to display multiple services or features that you offer to your customers. When placing a Facebook ad you can link each carousel photo to a different link, making it easy for people to navigate to your specific products.
Facebook Story: 1080 x 1920px
Make the most of your stories by using all of your space and creating a fullscreen experience.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION:
Page name:
This is where you can name your Facebook Page, but be sure to keep it shorter than 75 characters.
Page username:
Customize your page URL by adding a username, making it easier for people to locate and navigate people from other digital platforms. Your Facebook URL can include up to 50 characters.
Page call to action:
Facebook gives you a variety of choices on calls to action. For example, if you’d like customers to contact you by email, you can set up a “Send Email” button with your email address connected and ready to go.
IMAGE SIZING:
Profile picture: 400 x 400px
Upload your business logo here to personalize your profile. If this page is for an individual, this is where you will upload their headshot.
Cover Photo: 1584 x 396px
Having a personalized business cover photo will make your profile look more professional and give you the opportunity to provide page visitors with more of the look and feel of your business. This can include an image related to your business or a graphic with information on services you provide or your business slogan.
LinkedIn post photo: 1200 x 628px (mobile), 1200 x 1200px (desktop)
When targeting an audience on both desktop and mobile, make sure that you optimize for mobile to give people the best experience.
LinkedIn Link Photo: 1200 x 628px (mobile), 1200 x 1200px (desktop)
Providing an image with your link preview can help give viewers a better idea of article content and improve your click thru rates.
LinkedIn Link Video: 4096 x 2304px maximum, 256 x 144 pixels minimum
The optimal video length for LinkedIn is 30-90 seconds and the maximum file size is 5GB.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION
Page name:
This is where your business name is located, as well as your company industry, location, and number of followers.
Page description:
Add your business slogan, mission, or a short description that tells people what your company, products, and services can do for them.
X (Formerly Known as Twitter)
IMAGE SIZING
Profile picture: 400 x 400px
Upload your business logo or headshot to personalize your profile.
Cover photo: 1500 x 500px
Be sure to center your content to give your followers an optimized experience on mobile.
Twitter post photo: 1600 x 900px
Allow your followers to see the entirety of the photo in their feed by adhering to this sizing guideline. The maximum file size is 5MB.
X video: 1280 x 720px (desktop, recommended), 720 x 720px (mobile)
The optimal video length for Twitter is 20-45 seconds and the maximum file size is 512MB.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION
Underneath your profile photo, your company name and username will be displayed.
Write a short bio to tell people more about your business.
IMAGE SIZING
Profile photo: 110 x 110px
Your profile picture will be small, so be sure your image is sized correctly and centered. This is a great place for your company logo.
Profile thumbnail: Displays as 161 x 161px
This is a preview of your large image post, but looks best when the photo posted is square.
Highlight Cover: 1080 x 1920px
Your cover photos should have centered images to give your highlight reel a balanced look. You can also name your highlights, but be concise as they can only be 15 characters long.
Instagram Feed Photo: 1080 x 1080px (square), 1080 x 1350 (portrait), 1080 x 566 (landscape)
The recommended width for all Instagram feed photos is 1080px, but the height can vary. To optimize for your feed display within your profile, we recommend using the sizing listed above to keep your image square.
Instagram Feed Video: 1080 x 1080px (square), 1080 x 1350 (portrait), 1080 x 566 (landscape)
The optimal length for an Instagram video is 30-60 seconds and the max file size is 650MB.
Instagram Feed Ad Photo: 1080 x 1080px
Your ad photo will display the same as a normal feed photo, but with a link attached. When creating an ad in Ads Manager, you’ll be able to upload a separate photo for Instagram to keep your photos optimized for the user experience.
Instagram Story: 1080 x 1920px (portrait), 1080 x 601 (landscape)
Make the most of your stories by using all of your space and creating a fullscreen experience. The maximum length of the story is 60 seconds.
Instagram Reels & Live: 1080 x 1920px
Reels can be used to offer tutorials, demos, or service features. These will be saved under your profile page for viewers to go back and watch at their leisure. The maximum length for Reels is 90 seconds. For Live, this can be used for announcements, events, or other Q&A sessions. These can also be saved for later viewing, and can last up to 4 hours.
Known as the professional social networking platform, LinkedIn is a powerful tool for social selling, allowing your team to foster strategic customer relationships and build credibility. An important part of your online brand, your LinkedIn profile is a key source of information for people looking to learn more about you.
A strong LinkedIn profile creates opportunities for meaningful connections and interactions with other professionals. But how do you make LinkedIn a successful part of your marketing strategy? Well, for starters, you need to build trust. Use the following best practices to do just that.
1.) Add professional profile and cover photos. According to LinkedIn, a professional headshot makes your profile 21x more likely to be viewed, and profiles with photos get a 40% better message response rate. For best results, upload JPEG or PNG images sized as follows:
- Profile photo: 400x400 pixels
- Cover photo: 1584x396 pixels
Pro Tip: Bookmark our Up-to-Date Social Media Sizing & Resource Guide to optimize your images on every social media platform.
2. Write a compelling headline and summary. Your headline and summary should clearly and succinctly state who you are and why someone should connect with you.
- Headline: More than simply your job title, your headline should answer these two questions:
- Who do you help?
- How do you help?
- Summary: Use the following framework to write a compelling professional summary:
- Paragraph 1: In three sentences or less, what is your value prop to your prospective customers? Reiterate your purpose from your headline.
- Paragraph 2: In three sentences or less, how do you help customers achieve results?
- Paragraph 3: In three sentences or less, what is your call-to-action for the prospective customer?
Pro Tip: In your headline and summary, be sure to include keywords prospective customers might search for.
3. Engage frequently and consistently. Every week, apply consistent effort to LinkedIn to build credibility and keep content relevant and valuable for customers. Below is checklist of activities we recommend performing on a weekly basis:
- Post relevant content: Check your content library or search for trending topics in the LinkedIn search bar. You can find some great recent inspiration from others in your field.
- Post/schedule content at the right time: Generally, the best time to post on LinkedIn is Tuesday through Thursday between 10 and 11 a.m. Content posted in the evenings and on weekends tends to get less engagement. Check out this guide in our Help Center for more information on when to post on various social media channels.
- Seek recommendations from customers and share success stories: What’s better than telling your networks how great you are? Someone else saying it for you! Positive testimonials, endorsements and reviews go a long way in building your credibility.
- Check likes, follows, shares, hashtags and comments. Be sure to engage and respond as appropriate. Set weekly or monthly goals for growth and track progress.
- Grow your network: Join relevant groups in your industry to gain customer insights about needs and interests, follow influencers and connect with others.
Pro tip: Add a 30-minute weekly recurring event on your calendar to go through the above checklist.
LinkedIn should be an essential part of your team’s social selling strategy. Stay visible and build trust with consistency and an optimized profile.
Looking for a quick reference for all of this information? Check out this infographic.
“If you build it, they will come.”
While this advice may work in fictional baseball movies, it’s a bad strategy for building your Facebook business page following.
Successfully growing your page likes and follows requires ongoing attention, but it pays off.
More followers indicates greater popularity and trust in your brand and also means more eyeballs on your content.
Follow these tips to start growing your following today.
1. Share meaningful content. Before posting anything on your page, make sure it provides value to your audience. When you do this consistently, your existing followers will share it with their friends, attracting more followers. As you plan your content strategy, think about the topics you can speak to with authority. Then look for gaps in the content already being shared with your audience. Where these two intersect is a great place to focus your thought leadership efforts.
2. Be consistent. It goes without saying that consistency in voice, tone and style should be inherent in any marketing message. As you work to grow your Facebook page following, it’s also important to aim for consistency in when and how often you post content. When your content quality, quantity or schedule isn’t consistent, it can confuse your audience. Staying on a schedule will improve the experience you deliver and build your business’s credibility and reputation. Use a tool like Denim Social’s Analytics to test and monitor when engagement is at its highest, and design your content schedule accordingly.
3. Invite friends. One of the quickest, most efficient ways to start driving awareness and growing your audience is to invite your friends to follow your page. Remember, your friends have friends, and they might be interested in following your business and your new page.
4. Run ads. A surefire way to grow your following is to run Facebook ads. Ads are an effective tool for promoting your page, boosting your posts, getting more leads, increasing conversions and performing a number of other actions. Keep in mind, however, that it may not always be in your best interest to grow your following just for the sake of a bigger number. You want to attract people who are interested in your products and services (and, in turn, more likely to engage with your content). Using audience targeting strategies will help you reach the right consumer with the right message.
A Facebook business page is an easy and effective way to grow your brand awareness and credibility. Although it’s not as simple as set-it-and-forget-it, if you follow the tips outlined above, you will be well on your way to growing your Facebook fan base. If you need help engaging your audience on social media, get in touch with us today.
Where Are the Biggest Opportunities to Use Social Media in Financial Services?
Denim Social's Guide To Social Selling For Financial Services shows that most financial professionals — 83% of those surveyed — have a social media presence. It’s a great place to start, but having a profile is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what benefits financial institutions can enjoy from social media. Smart financial marketers and their teams should be optimizing their social selling efforts on every network to get the most out of what social media has to offer.
Customers are active in many other places online, so why not meet them there? After all, 79% of people look to social media for financial advice. By meeting customers where they are on the main 4 networks, financial institutions can stay top of mind and grow real, authentic connections. Let’s dive into what Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have to offer and how financial services marketers can best use each platform.
1. Instagram
As far as major social media platforms in financial services go, Instagram tops the list. While many financial professionals might not at first think of the photographic and visual network as prime business territory, its popularity makes it an excellent place to strengthen real relationships.
Instagram is one of the best ways to get in front of younger audiences, which is a worthwhile goal, considering that many Millennial customers will likely be on the search for new financial services providers as Baby Boomers pass their wealth on to the next generations. What's more, 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business account and 80% use the platform to discover new products.
Even better, getting started on Instagram is a breeze. Instagram ads also allow hyperlinks, so you can lead readers right from their feeds to your website with specific calls to action to learn more. Lead them to a personalized and well-designed landing page on your site, for instance, and you'll be drawing each follower who clicks through one big step closer to conversion.
2. LinkedIn
The majority of financial services providers already use LinkedIn, and there are many ways to make it perhaps the most successful social selling platform out of all the networks. Employees at institutions of all sizes and financial industries can use this professional network to cultivate thought leadership and educate their customers.
For financial services marketers, a brand profile is a necessary starting point. Getting the most out of the platform, however, requires activating your employees in a social selling strategy. They can share relevant content, such as videos and published articles from trusted media outlets, as well as engage with customers and prospects one-on-one via direct messaging to establish themselves as experts and build trusting relationships. People want to engage with other people, not with general brand pages. It’s no wonder that employees on social media can garner 10x the engagement of brand pages alone.
3. Twitter
Like LinkedIn, Twitter is also a great place for agents, loan officers, and advisors to share their expertise. Understandably, financial services marketers might be intimidated by the fast-paced nature of the platform and fear they don’t have enough resources to keep up. However, with the proper social media management tools, maintaining compliant engagement on Twitter is totally possible — and worth it.
One of the greatest benefits of social media marketing for financial services is the ability to provide more value to customers. Twitter makes this incredibly easy to do. Marketers can follow all relevant news media outlets and keep an eye out for any articles that might benefit their clients or prospects. For example, an explainer piece on recent changes in tax legislation may be helpful come tax season. Retweeting such helpful resources educates followers on financial topics and builds trust in the brand and its employees.
There’s no single best social media platform for marketing. Each one has a unique opportunity to reach and engage current and future customers. If you’re already on social media, it’s time to level up your social media marketing strategy by diving into Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in more depth. No matter the size of your financial institution, extending your social media strategy to encompass these platforms can help grow your audience, build trust, and maintain solid customer relationships.
Connect & Convert on Social
Understanding Social Media Analytics: Optimizing ROI
Social media marketing can have a huge reach — 83% of people say they discover new products on Instagram, and 54% of Gen Z say social media is their top influence channel. Why is it, then, that so many digital marketers feel uncomfortable evaluating metrics and measuring ROI in social media marketing?
Understanding how to link social efforts and social media ROI metrics can help financial institution marketers leverage the sway these channels have over increasingly important demographics while continuing to reach those already undertaking the digital customer journey with your institution.
With the personal networks offered on the organic side and the advanced targeting of paid ads, social media is tough to beat as a customer acquisition tool and can also provide valuable data on customers’ needs and interests.
But all the social media data in the world means nothing if you can’t transform it into meaningful insights in relation to business objectives.
A good starting point is defining those objectives and collecting data with the right social media management tool — one that can make sense of a vast amount of information. The right tools and platforms will boil down the data digital marketers need and give them the confidence to identify ROI metric success and share those insights with their company.
How Can Your Company Properly Utilize Social Media ROI Metrics?
Identifying meaningful insights around business objectives begins with setting specific measurable goals that connect to your next social media marketing campaign and benchmark your brand’s social performance. It also requires using the social media analytics and insights available to optimize your social media marketing strategy, increase ROI, and reach business goals. If you’re looking to hone your use of social media ROI metrics to optimize your social media marketing strategy, start with these steps:
1. Refine your messaging.
Results from every post, whether paid or organic, present opportunities to learn more about what messaging connects with audiences. Upon review, you come to a better understanding of what topics drive greater engagement, which calls to action deliver clicks, and so on, especially with Denim Social’s ability to track individual posts’ performance across channels. This is an iterative process, but paying closer attention to social media ROI metrics can help shape future strategies to resonate with distinct audiences.
2. Home in on your audience.
The beauty of social media marketing is its ability to eliminate wasting time, money, and effort on the wrong audiences. Let’s say you ran a paid social ad. Pull together the social media analytics by target audience, and you will gain insights about who connects with what content. Then, devote some dollars to ad experimentation, coupled with your social media data, and you can start to maximize future ad spend and stop wasting money on irrelevant or disengaged audiences.
3. Capture competitive intelligence.
Research can tell you a lot about consumer sentiments as they relate to not just your institution but the competition as well. Be sure to keep an eye on your top competitors, so that you understand where you're at. Competitive intelligence can provide immeasurable value for finding new marketing opportunities.
4. Connect social clicks to the digital customer journey.
Social media should never mark the end of the digital customer journey. Connect social media to broader customer acquisition tools, like landing pages, contact forms, and more, to free the path of obstacles. With trackable links and social media analytics, you can then connect the digital dots from social media posts to lead generation to the intended sale.
5. Give it time.
Don’t make the mistake of measuring ROI in social media marketing too soon. When connecting the value of social media to broader business objectives, allow enough room to sync your measurement time with the sales cycle. Otherwise, you risk underestimating the impact of such an initiative. In fact, 77% of digital marketers measure ROI within the first month of a campaign, yet 52% have sales cycles of three months or more.
Social media channels are a treasure trove of data often overlooked by financial institution marketers. Denim Social’s platform can help you gather this information with ease and turn it into valuable insights. What’s more, the platform now generates easily sharable analytics reports, so you can show your organization’s leaders exactly how social media marketing efforts tie into the business’s bottom line.
Retail banks in the U.S. are facing a major customer attrition challenges. According to a recent Bain report, customers make as many as 55 percent of financial-related purchases from their primary bank’s competitors. While primary banks may be able to retain customers’ savings and checking accounts, the report suggests that they’re likely losing out on lucrative sales when it comes to loans, credit cards and investments.
Considering that almost one-third of those who defected from their primary bank did so in response to a direct offer from a competitor, wise marketers will up their customer engagement and outreach efforts to retain more customers. Affordability of products is the top reason for customer defection, which marketers may not have much say in, but it isn’t the only contributing factor. Digitization has also been a major catalyst. Namely, the strong digital products and experiences that some banks offer—and others do not.
Bank marketers who can jump onboard the digitization train to meet customers where they are with engaging, valuable messaging will be much more likely to keep customers coming back again and again for each of their financial needs. The following strategies can help:
1. Put the human element front and center
Traditional banks have an innate advantage over digital direct banks: The human touch. Leveraging this benefit, especially when it comes to increasingly digital customer interactions, can lead to measurable improvements in customer retention.
One way to ensure the human touch remains part of every customer touchpoint is to focus on personalization. A February Insurance Thought Leadership piece revealed that 72 percent of people ignore marketing that’s not highly personalized. So targeting relevant content to the right recipients is essential, especially when digitization can easily strip the human element out of an interaction. Personalizing messaging and services to be relevant and valuable to the specific needs of each customer can bring the human element into focus even in a digital world.
One way to create more relevant, personalized outreach is to practice social selling, or leveraging a bank’s employees on social media. People can relate more to other people than they can to big brand names. When your employees are the ones getting in front of customers virtually, it humanizes the digital customer experience and sets the stage for trusting and loyal relationships to come. What’s more, employees also tend to have further reach and engagement on brand-related social posts than brand pages alone, so they can expand the impact of your messaging exponentially.
2. Create digital pathways to human interactions
When considering how to anchor all digital marketing for financial services around the human element, keep in mind that every pathway should connect prospects and customers directly to a human.
For example, a social media post from an employee could include a link to a landing page on your website where visitors can learn more valuable information on the topic of the post. On that landing page, you can include valuable content, such as a guidebook, behind an information request form. When users submit their names and email addresses, they will receive the content and your sales team members can reach out to them directly with a human-centric, personalized outreach approach.
When prospects and customers know they’re just an email or phone call away from a real person at your organization, they’re likely to turn to you instead of an impersonal digital direct bank for their next financial need.
3. Focus on customer retention just as much as acquisition
Bringing in new prospects gets a lot of attention from financial services marketers, sometimes at the expense of retaining current ones. But focusing on customer retention and continuously improving the digital customer experience will help secure more revenue when it comes to additional services such as loans and credit cards.
Listen to the needs of customers and keep refining your personalization tactics to meet their needs. Every time you get in front of a current customer with relevant, valuable messaging or content, you help build trust in that relationship and increase the chances of that customer coming to you for whatever service they need next.
It’s true that people will always be drawn to brands that offer more affordable products and services. But money isn’t the only reason people look outside of their primary bank to fulfill their financial needs. Banks that differentiate by focusing on digitization alongside the human element will find that it’s easier to keep current customers from looking for greener pastures.
This was originally published on ABA Bank Marketing.
In today's digital age, social media platforms have become essential tools for professionals in various industries to connect with clients, share valuable insights, and build their brand. Instagram, with its visual appeal and highly-engaged user base, is no exception. For financial professionals, leveraging Instagram can be a powerful way to showcase expertise, establish credibility, and build stronger relationships. In this blog post, we will discuss the best practices for building your Instagram business profile as a financial professional that will give your social selling a boost.
Choose a Professional Username and Profile Picture
Start by selecting a username that reflects your name or your financial business's name. Keep it simple and easy to remember. Use a high-quality profile picture, such as a professional headshot or your company logo. This picture will be the first impression potential followers have of you.
Optimize Your Bio
Craft a concise and informative bio that clearly defines your role and expertise. Use relevant keywords, such as "Financial Advisor," "Mortgage Loan Officer,” or "Insurance Agent." Include a brief but captivating description of the value you provide to your customers. Highlight any unique selling points or specializations.
Content Strategy
Determine your content niche. Share content that aligns with your expertise, such as investment tips, financial planning advice, or market insights. Develop a content calendar to ensure consistency. Aim for a mix of educational, inspirational, and personal posts. Use high-quality images and graphics to enhance your posts. Visual appeal is essential on Instagram!
Engage Your Audience
Respond promptly to comments and direct messages. Engaging with your followers builds a sense of trust and connection. You want your followers to engage with your posts, so do the same for them! Like, comment, and share to help increase visibility.
Use Hashtags Wisely
Research and use relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your posts. Utilize both industry-specific and popular hashtags. Best practice is to use 5-10 hashtags per post as they relate to the content.
Collaborate and Network
Collaborate with influencers or other professionals in your industry. Guest posts or shoutouts can expand your reach. Attend industry events and share your experiences on Instagram. It’s all about taking those in-person relationships online, too.
Educate and Inform
Share informative and educational content that empowers your audience. Explainer videos, infographics, and step-by-step guides can be especially valuable. Stay up-to-date with the latest financial news and trends, and share your unique insights with your followers. Always provide value!
Analytics and Optimization
Regularly analyze your Instagram Insights to understand which content performs best and when your audience is most active. Use this data to refine your content strategy and posting schedule for optimal engagement.
Promote Your Services
While Instagram is a platform for sharing valuable content, don't forget to promote your services subtly. Share client success stories or case studies to showcase your expertise in action.
Stay Compliant
Ensure that your posts comply with industry regulations and guidelines. Be transparent about any potential conflicts of interest. Luckily, platforms like Denim Social that are built for the financial services industry can help with that!
In conclusion, Instagram can be a valuable tool for financial professionals to connect with clients and prospects. By following these best practices, you can build a strong and trustworthy online presence that sets you apart in the competitive world of finance. Remember that consistency and authenticity are key to establishing a successful Instagram business profile for financial professionals. See our Denim Social guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram here!
Connecting with customers and prospects on social media is a natural extension of the financial services industry becoming more digital. Consumers expect the businesses they patronize to be on the same social platforms they use — and they expect those brands to be ready to interact with them. Case in point: A survey of over 500 social media users found that nearly three-quarters follow organizations on social platforms, and the vast majority of them interact with those brands on social.
Social media is the perfect tool for financial institutions to build brand awareness, meet the demand for greater digital engagement, recruit prospective customers, and drive referrals.
While social media is a great way to connect with customers and prospects, it’s not without its risk. It’s essential to use social media tools that will keep your team in compliance.
1. START WITH A SOCIAL SELLING STRATEGY.
There are few limits to how you can connect with customers and prospects on social media, but it needs to be about more than posts from a brand page. Direct messaging is always an option for private communication, but to reach more people at scale, social sellers (i.e., agents, loan officers, financial advisors, intermediaries, etc.) should also be posting original content, resharing educational articles, responding to comments and questions, and liking others’ posts. With so many options, it’s important for marketers to craft a social selling strategy that guides social sellers in their social interactions on behalf of the institution.
A well-thought-out strategy can ensure effective social selling. For instance, rather than posting on channels at random and hoping for the best, social sellers can determine which social media platforms suit them best based on audience engagement and follower counts; then they can focus their efforts there. Consider also equipping intermediaries with a library of branded content they can mix in with their personal posts. This strategy will inform your all-important social media policy moving forward.
2. TURN YOUR STRATEGY INTO A DETAILED POLICY.
In a heavily regulated industry, it’s essential for firms to have a comprehensive social media policy. This is a package of brand messaging in a detailed policy to help ensure consistency when social sellers post on your behalf.
Take the plan you mapped out in your strategy and turn it into a documented policy that intermediaries can access easily. Social media and the way people use it continues to evolve, which is why your social media policy should always be a work in progress. Make updates periodically to account for shifts in your approval workflow, changes in messaging, and general social media best practices. As social sellers become savvier, your policy will grow more detailed.
3. MAKE TRAINING AN ONGOING EFFORT.
Intermediaries who are new to social media will require initial training — but it shouldn’t be a one-and-done initiative. Hold regular social selling workshops to keep all social sellers up to date on your social media policy and messaging.
You can also use workshop time to walk your team through any tools you invest in to fuel social media efforts. Denim Social, for example, offers live product demos you can share to show them how to use the technology and get the most benefit.
Demonstrate how the software streamlines the approval process for posts and automatically archives them for future reference. The more they know, the more comfortable they’ll be using such tools to facilitate social selling efforts. The great news is, our customer success team is here to help get your team trained and ready.
Social media opens up a world of opportunity for financial institutions to reach and engage customers and prospects, but that doesn’t mean you should set your team free to do as they please. The right strategy and social media management software can make it a lot easier to avoid mistakes and create a successful social selling strategy. Want to see how Denim Social can help your team up their social media game? Schedule a demo today!
Instagram stands out as the shining star of social media platforms. While Facebook still reigns supreme and TikTok grows, Instagram is quickly catching up fast with more than 2 billion users worldwide.
With users under age 34 making up nearly 60 percent of this user population, financial services marketers looking to reach younger generations should take note. And with an estimated sum of $68 trillion in wealth expected to transfer from Baby Boomers to Millennials in the next couple of decades, Millennials are a worthwhile target.
Studies predict that, after inheriting wealth, 80% or more young heirs will seek out a new financial advisor. Considering that 9 in 10 accounts follow at least one business on Instagram and 8 in 10 users find new products and services in the app, it’s a safe bet that Instagram will be a place to influence many Millennials. Wise financial services marketers will meet them where they are with strong Instagram marketing strategies, and the following tips can help:
1. Focus on paid ads
Instagram is a visual platform for sharing photos and videos, so it’s important for brand pages to populate their profiles with organic posts. While this presence is important, organic content isn’t what will move the needle on business goals. Financial services aren’t exactly visually interesting, and organic posts tend to have low reach as they only show up in the feeds of a brand’s current followers. Without the ability to include hyperlinks in captions, they also won’t drive any traffic back to your site. If you want to build the type of following needed to generate new business, including paid advertising in your Instagram marketing strategy is your ticket.
With Instagram advertising, institutions and advisors can target ads to land with exactly the right audience — even outside their follower base — and include links in posts to drive more traffic to the brand. With a specific call to action that directs consumers to learn more about a topic, Instagram ads offer a straight-line path to giving customers the valuable information they desire — in their own time and at their own place. What’s more, Instagram advertising is seamlessly integrated directly into Instagram feeds and stories, creating a smoother user experience all around.
2. Connect with consumers on a local level
Instagram marketing on the corporate brand level is a great starting point, but advertising on behalf of your individual advisors can take your strategy to the next level. Think of it this way: If a consumer sees a well-known brand on social media, they might recognize the name, but they won’t feel an intrinsic connection beyond initial familiarity. In contrast, they’ll feel familiarity and an immediate connection when they see a post from an advisor in their own community. Consumers want to build relationships with brands, and a shared community is a great starting point.
Of course, most advisors and other financial services employees are not experts on how to market the business on Instagram. And marketers know they must keep all social media marketing for their financial institutions compliant to avoid heavy regulatory reprimands. To keep posts compliant, save employees time, and help them build relationships with consumers in their physical communities, financial services marketers can set up and run ads on their behalf.
3. Micro-target content to your audience
As big-name brands like Amazon continue to elevate the digital customer experience with seamless customer service, purchasing, and delivery, customer expectations are higher than ever before. When customers evaluate a financial institution, they compare it not only to other organizations in the industry, but also to tech giants in any industry that give them exactly what they need when they need it.
They expect a high level of personalization and convenience, and Instagram marketing with paid advertising can help you give it to them. Match basic behavioral and geographic data to potential customers on Instagram to target ads, and then track clicks, engagements, and post-click actions. These data points don’t indicate much on their own, but together they offer a rich story about what consumers want. Continually refine your strategy with these data points in mind to deliver the kind of highly personalized experiences your audiences want on Instagram.
With a large Millennial user base that engages actively with brands online and the ability to target highly personalized ads to exactly the right audiences, Instagram is a must-have in any financial services marketing strategy. To learn more about how Instagram marketing can work to drive your business forward, download our guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram for free today.
Make the most of your social media pages and posts by optimizing your images and including essential information about your business on each platform. By giving customers an optimal digital experience, you can broaden reach and provide better customer service through your digital platforms.
IMAGE SIZING:
Profile picture: 176 x 176px (desktop), 196x 196px (smartphones)
Cover photo: 820 x 312px (desktop), 640 x 360px (smartphones)
Keep the main content of your image centered. On a desktop the photo will display as 840x312px, but on mobile will size down to 640x360px.
Facebook post image: 1200 x 630px
The ideal width for a Facebook post image is 1200px, but height can vary based on what type of device the image display is optimized for. We recommend keeping it at the recommended size to keep consistency on all devices.
When creating a Facebook Ad graphic, any text should not take up more than 20% of the photo. You can find a cheat sheet here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay.
Facebook Video: 1280 x 720px
The optimal length for a short-form video on Facebook is 15 seconds to 1 minute; for a long-form video, it is 3 minutes. The maximum file size is 10GB.
Facebook Link Image: 1200 x 630px
Make sure to claim ownership of your links for the ability to change the link preview photo. You can find more info on that here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/528858287471922?id=708699556338610.
Carousel Post: 1080 x 1080px
Carousel posts are a great way to display multiple services or features that you offer to your customers. When placing a Facebook ad you can link each carousel photo to a different link, making it easy for people to navigate to your specific products.
Facebook Story: 1080 x 1920px
Make the most of your stories by using all of your space and creating a fullscreen experience.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION:
Page name:
This is where you can name your Facebook Page, but be sure to keep it shorter than 75 characters.
Page username:
Customize your page URL by adding a username, making it easier for people to locate and navigate people from other digital platforms. Your Facebook URL can include up to 50 characters.
Page call to action:
Facebook gives you a variety of choices on calls to action. For example, if you’d like customers to contact you by email, you can set up a “Send Email” button with your email address connected and ready to go.
IMAGE SIZING:
Profile picture: 400 x 400px
Upload your business logo here to personalize your profile. If this page is for an individual, this is where you will upload their headshot.
Cover Photo: 1584 x 396px
Having a personalized business cover photo will make your profile look more professional and give you the opportunity to provide page visitors with more of the look and feel of your business. This can include an image related to your business or a graphic with information on services you provide or your business slogan.
LinkedIn post photo: 1200 x 628px (mobile), 1200 x 1200px (desktop)
When targeting an audience on both desktop and mobile, make sure that you optimize for mobile to give people the best experience.
LinkedIn Link Photo: 1200 x 628px (mobile), 1200 x 1200px (desktop)
Providing an image with your link preview can help give viewers a better idea of article content and improve your click thru rates.
LinkedIn Link Video: 4096 x 2304px maximum, 256 x 144 pixels minimum
The optimal video length for LinkedIn is 30-90 seconds and the maximum file size is 5GB.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION
Page name:
This is where your business name is located, as well as your company industry, location, and number of followers.
Page description:
Add your business slogan, mission, or a short description that tells people what your company, products, and services can do for them.
X (Formerly Known as Twitter)
IMAGE SIZING
Profile picture: 400 x 400px
Upload your business logo or headshot to personalize your profile.
Cover photo: 1500 x 500px
Be sure to center your content to give your followers an optimized experience on mobile.
Twitter post photo: 1600 x 900px
Allow your followers to see the entirety of the photo in their feed by adhering to this sizing guideline. The maximum file size is 5MB.
X video: 1280 x 720px (desktop, recommended), 720 x 720px (mobile)
The optimal video length for Twitter is 20-45 seconds and the maximum file size is 512MB.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION
Underneath your profile photo, your company name and username will be displayed.
Write a short bio to tell people more about your business.
IMAGE SIZING
Profile photo: 110 x 110px
Your profile picture will be small, so be sure your image is sized correctly and centered. This is a great place for your company logo.
Profile thumbnail: Displays as 161 x 161px
This is a preview of your large image post, but looks best when the photo posted is square.
Highlight Cover: 1080 x 1920px
Your cover photos should have centered images to give your highlight reel a balanced look. You can also name your highlights, but be concise as they can only be 15 characters long.
Instagram Feed Photo: 1080 x 1080px (square), 1080 x 1350 (portrait), 1080 x 566 (landscape)
The recommended width for all Instagram feed photos is 1080px, but the height can vary. To optimize for your feed display within your profile, we recommend using the sizing listed above to keep your image square.
Instagram Feed Video: 1080 x 1080px (square), 1080 x 1350 (portrait), 1080 x 566 (landscape)
The optimal length for an Instagram video is 30-60 seconds and the max file size is 650MB.
Instagram Feed Ad Photo: 1080 x 1080px
Your ad photo will display the same as a normal feed photo, but with a link attached. When creating an ad in Ads Manager, you’ll be able to upload a separate photo for Instagram to keep your photos optimized for the user experience.
Instagram Story: 1080 x 1920px (portrait), 1080 x 601 (landscape)
Make the most of your stories by using all of your space and creating a fullscreen experience. The maximum length of the story is 60 seconds.
Instagram Reels & Live: 1080 x 1920px
Reels can be used to offer tutorials, demos, or service features. These will be saved under your profile page for viewers to go back and watch at their leisure. The maximum length for Reels is 90 seconds. For Live, this can be used for announcements, events, or other Q&A sessions. These can also be saved for later viewing, and can last up to 4 hours.
So you've invested the time, energy, and money into building a website that details all of your financial products and services, and you have a solid social media strategy in place — but do you have any means of connecting the two? A full digital marketing strategy requires a connection point to lead prospects along the digital journey and toward conversion. Landing pages can serve as the bridges you need.
These pages live on your website and hold information geared toward specific audience segments. For example, if an insurance agent is interested in helping first-time homebuyers with homeowners insurance, a social media post on the subject could include a link to a landing page on your website with even more resources for new buyers.
Landing pages are important because no matter how well-built your website homepage is, it simply can’t serve the needs of every consumer — not conveniently, at least. Without landing pages, site visitors arrive on the homepage and are left to dig through the site for specific information on their own. Landing pages, on the other hand, allow visitors to arrive at your site in the exact place they want to be. It’s the best way for financial institution marketers to quickly and easily offer content that meets the specific needs of various target audiences.
Customers want this level of personalization, and they're open to the idea of trading their information for it. In fact, more than three-quarters of consumers in one study said they would be willing to give more personal data in return for more tailored services. When customers submit their contact information through a form to download the content on your landing page, not only are they getting tailored content, but you're getting data that can fuel more personalized outreach directly to primed prospects. And that leads to higher conversion rates.
Start creating landing pages by planning a page for each promotion in your overall marketing campaign or for each of your target audiences. Then, we recommend the following steps to drive conversion:
1. Keep it simple and direct.
Ultimately, the goal of a landing page for financial institutions is to learn more about prospects by gathering their information in the form field. For visitors, the clearer the path to the field, the likelier they will be to share their data. Don’t fill a page with too many images, multiple offers, and other clutter — you’ll just increase the chances of visitors bouncing off the page before taking action. Instead, stick with concise, clear messaging, easy-to-follow directives, strong calls to action, and impactful design elements.
2. Leverage pre-built, fully customizable templates.
Few marketing professionals have the bandwidth or experience to build a whole webpage on their own. Fortunately, software like Denim Social with landing page functionality will offer pre-built, customizable templates that allow you to start with a page already optimized for conversion.
From there, you can easily customize the content, form fields, colors, images, and video on each page to fit your campaign goals. The key here is to keep a consistent style across pages so each one fits under your overall brand umbrella.
3. Scale, scale, scale!
The real beauty of using pre-built, customizable templates is the ability to design, build, and launch landing pages at scale. Denim Social’s code-free interface makes it easy for anyone to populate many templates with customized elements — no web design expertise required. Just personalize, publish, then easily iterate and adjust based on conversion data.
In practice, this looks like building hundreds or even thousands of highly professional landing pages in just minutes. That’s a lot more opportunity for targeted messaging than one broad website homepage on its own.
Landing pages are one of the most effective tools at your disposal to create tailored experiences, capture valuable information, and generate high-quality leads. With the right platform, any marketer can build landing pages at scale and propel more prospects toward conversion.